Chapter 31: Rallying the Troops

Chapter 31: Waving the Banner and Shouting

The Milky Way in the night sky began to drift slowly, the stars like tiny diamonds carried along by the current.

Fang Xiaoling followed Jung farther and farther away. Gradually, she could no longer see where the bonfire was, and she rarely encountered any spirits. Even when she did, they were usually alone. Jung called such spirits lone spirits. Several times, Fang Xiaoling wanted to ask their names, thinking that perhaps she might know them, but Jung stopped her each time.

“Do not provoke lone spirits. Most of them are violent, cruel, and cold-blooded creatures. Yet in the Star Realm, they are incapable of physically harming any spirit, and so they feel empty.”

At last, in a place where not a single spirit could be seen, Jung stopped walking.

“Ant A does not die.”

“What?”

Jung tossed the bundle onto the ground and raised his head toward the flowing stars.

“Without proof, Ant A has no way to live on that sheet of paper. Your previous answer was correct. But there is one thing you failed to explain: Ant A does not die because, as far as that sheet of paper is concerned, it never existed in the first place. You cannot kill someone who is already dead.”

“One who is not born cannot die; this extinction is the greatest bliss...” Fang Xiaoling suddenly understood. “Then what exactly happens to Ant A?”

“It gets thrown off that sheet and cast onto some other sheet. If another sheet is willing to take it in, that would be ideal. More likely, however, before the first sheet has time to throw the ant away, another sheet will have already snatched it up.”

Jung continued gazing at the night sky, as though searching for one particular star.

“Do you know what kind of sheet would snatch it away?”

“Certainly the sheet where Ant A originally lived. You could say that sheet is Ant A’s true world, couldn’t you? Just as the world where I was born contains my true self. The same would hold if we made an analogy between three dimensions and two. That sheet contains Pit A and proof of Ant A’s existence. It would certainly take Ant A in at once.”

Fang Xiaoling answered with complete certainty and offered what seemed to be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Jung rejected it even more quickly.

“No! That first sheet contains not only Pit A, but also Pit B, and even Pits C, D, E, and F. That sheet lacks neither ants nor pits. In fact, it has too many of both! At most, it would temporarily preserve Pit A and wait for Ant A to come home. But if Ant A never returned, that might actually be a better outcome for the sheet.”

When Fang Xiaoling had first heard Jung’s question about the ant, she had instinctively imagined Ant A as herself. Now, hearing him say this, she immediately realized something that left her feeling deeply saddened.

“For the world containing my true self, it would actually be better if I never went back?”

“That is not the important point. The important point is this: which sheet would be willing to snatch up that unproven Ant A? Or rather, which world would be willing to snatch up a soul like you?”

Jung gave Fang Xiaoling no time to think on her own. He immediately continued.

“It would be a blank sheet, one with no pits and no ants at all. In other words...”

At this point, Jung paused. He drew a deep breath before uttering three words:

“The Deflated Bottle.”

Fang Xiaoling remembered being at Li Mengling’s home, staring at a certain point of light in the air. The point had grown larger and larger until it swallowed her whole. Inside was a world containing nothing at all.

And yet, later, it came to contain everything.

“Ant A can do anything it wants on that blank sheet, can’t it?” Fang Xiaoling already knew the answer, but she still waited for Jung’s final conclusion.

“More precisely, the blank sheet has finally acquired an ant it can use. A blank sheet has no consciousness of its own. It can only use the ant’s consciousness to create everything. Thus, whatever Ant A imagines will come into being. If it wants a round pit, the pit will be round. If it wants a square pit, that too can be achieved without difficulty. But the moment Ant A’s consciousness gives rise to that foolish idea, it will be digging its own grave.”

This time, Fang Xiaoling did not wait for Jung to finish. She interrupted him.

“That idea is to create other ants with consciousness...”

“Exactly.”

Jung’s head, which he had kept tilted toward the sky, finally lowered. He looked into Fang Xiaoling’s eyes as though gazing at a relative from whom he had been separated for many years.

“When your family has only one hen that lays eggs, you will not kill it. You may even protect it. But if that hen gives birth to many more hens capable of laying eggs, then whether she lives or dies gradually becomes unimportant...”

Fang Xiaoling understood.

Even in the world where she had been omnipotent, she had not been a god. The true god was that world itself—the Deflated Bottle.

“When my thoughts gradually filled the Deflated Bottle and created other people capable of producing thoughts, it no longer needed me. I went from occupying an extraordinarily special position to becoming an existence no different from everyone else’s—or even one of lesser status.”

“Actually, if we raise our perspective to a higher dimension, we will discover that the Deflated Bottle is also a humble existence. Like those blank sheets, it cannot seize the ants that already exist on other sheets. And without the help of three-dimensional humans, an ant cannot leap onto another sheet. Even if it does, every parallel sheet has a friendly relationship with the others, so there will already be a pit waiting for it there... Those blank sheets are like hens that have starved for countless centuries, waiting for their savior to appear and give them a single grain of rice. The person who takes an ant to another sheet and erases the pit beneath it is the savior of every blank sheet—or, rather, every Deflated Bottle.”

“A savior...” Fang Xiaoling gave a bitter laugh and shook her head. “But what did the ant do wrong? To the ant that was taken away, the person who carried it off would be nothing short of a demon.”

“Who knows? Would you worry about an ant’s feelings? Perhaps that person simply disliked the ant. Perhaps they were conducting some kind of experiment. Perhaps they just thought it would be fun. Heh...”

Jung sat down and pulled several pens and a thick notebook from his pack. It seemed he wanted to prepare the ground for the arduous work ahead with a little humor, so he made a joke.

“Come to think of it, perhaps the ant itself was waving a banner and shouting to the humans, ‘Take me away! Please, take me away!’ And as a result, it really did attract human attention, so they took it away. Ha ha! If that were truly the case, that ant would have to be a complete idiot!”

Fang Xiaoling knew Jung had not meant to speak so cruelly, but his words still filled her with an indescribable emotion. She wanted to be angry, yet she could find no one at whom to direct her anger. She wanted to regret what had happened, yet realized that it was already too late. She even felt like laughing—laughing at how unbelievably foolish she had been, laughing because she had turned out to be that very ant waving the banner and shouting.

Yet the countless stars flowing across the night sky seemed to have been laughing at her all along.

The memory Fang Xiaoling least wanted to recall now played through her mind like a film.

Beneath the enormous artificial starry sky at Phase One of Canglan International, her true self had spread her arms, raised her head, and cried out:

“God, if you truly exist, please take me away! This world has abandoned me! Please take me away. I beg you, take me away!”

“I was even begging them...” Fang Xiaoling collapsed onto the ground. Her eyes had lost all their light, filled instead with a truth as darkly humorous as it was cruel.

“No matter what those higher-dimensional people intended, Roland was the little ant they wanted to take away... Heh heh heh. Originally, none of this had anything to do with me...”

Her eyes wept, but her mouth stretched into a smile. Her expression was almost identical to that of her true self when she had broken down and screamed at Canglan International.

“It was not Roland who dragged me into this. It was that, at precisely that moment, I acted like an idiot and waved a banner at those higher-dimensional people, shouting for them to take me away...”

End of Chapter 31